(no subject)

[lenora_rose]

Writing:

I'd been working pretty steadily on the Blood Rose, until I hit a point where, as I put it to Colin, the characters are trying to do the sensible adult thing and I have to figure out why they can't. (This feels like the opposite of my usual problem these days, where I have to remind myself when writing that teenagers aren't always sensible and often do give in to their first impulses. In this case, though, it's grown-ups who ahve to be stopped by some circumstance from doing the best possible action in their situation and the "But really secretly I want to just give up and do the wrong thing" while present, isn't remotely sufficient even if it does mean they'll breathe easier at an excuse.

Into that pause a brand new story idea started poking itself.

It's a portal fantasy and a sea voyage, and at least partly the fault of reading Ana Mardoll's often-excellent Narnia Deconstruction posts. but it's also not just "Let's fix the Voyage of the Dawn Treader with Liberal Feminist politics" which sounds like a recipe for a pretty awful story to ME - it may have started sprung by an idea in those deconstructions but it's wandering all kinds of places.

See, on my map of my fictional world, there's an ocean which takes up pretty much all of one hemisphere (Like the Pacific, but possibly even more so, as the land masses on the other side don't add up to the size of all Earth's continents). And it's canon that NOBODY goes there. Well, you know, there's ocean trade to some close-by islands and the like, but the heart of it? Is a big no-no. All that's really known or suspected is that what's there is part of why most selkie cultures are pathologically against the acquisition of gold or wealth. And that sometimes boats come back, but when they do, nobody on board can remember their own names or families, much less anything they saw there.

And of course, even I, the maker of the world, who has at least a couple of paragraphs sketching out pretty much every other land, even the ones I have no stories to write about (The whole southern continent - which unlike our Antarctica goes far enough north to have sapient-habitable places) didn't really know what was up with it.

And now a God is sending one poor vessel right in there, on what even He isn't pretending is anything but a suicide mission - and he's going to be dropping some people from our world into it (For as it happens sensible and relevant reasons other than 'they need to learn some big Moral Lesson' - that IS one of the few Lewis-things that is even at this stage being beaten into a small pulp). And I already have some ideas what they're going to find. It's really weird, having the big empty blotch on the map start to fill itself out so thoroughly and so fast.

Of course, I live in the centre of a continent and have approximately zero experience with sailing ships. And it's definitely age of sail - though with what minuscule bit of initial reading I've done, I think I may be basing the main ship(s) on something more like junks or other not-as-recognizeable-to-fans-of-Patrick-O'Brien vessels. (Which leads to the question how many of the most familiar nautical terms are essential to the ships themselves and how many are out of European tradition, which is a messy can of worms...*)

And the mother of a toddler isn't going to be able to take off for a random set of how-to-sail-a-sailboat lessons, as Amy Raby did before writing some of her current books.

So. Lots of reading in my near future. And I think I'm going to have to start with Jim Macdonald's quick-and-dirty research method of beginning with books aimed at kids, not just because it's quick and dirty but because my knowledge is THAT far behind.

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*For instance, why would a ship from another world with different traditions use port and starboard? Would they necessarily have historically put the steering oar to the right and thus dock at a port on the left? Would they be using the differing colours of lights or some other means to signal side, and would they have the same tradition of who gives way when to avoid a collision?

And of course, what's *worth* changing to say "Different world, dudes" versus worth leaving alone to say "I like you to be able to read the meat of the adventure and not get confused by trivialities"?

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

I really enjoy reading about your world-building. :) And I'm also following Ana's deconstructions, which makes this post doubly interesting.

[lenora_rose]

Part of the fun of this is knowing that the deity is unapologetically a bit of a jerk. But he has a reason for it other than "the author wrote me that way."